Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

by Batya Ungar-Sargon

Writing in the 1990s, the historian Christopher Lasch argued that the Left had begun to portray the nation, the neighborhood, and even the commitment to a common standard as racist, as part of a larger attack on populism and abandonment of the working class.

It took the guilt that they should have felt around their economic good fortune and political power—which they could have shared with the less fortunate had they cared to—and displaced it onto their whiteness, an immutable characteristic that they could do absolutely nothing to change.

white liberals arrived at a situation where instead of agitating for a more equal society, they agitated for more diverse elites. Instead of asking why our elites have risen so far above the average American, they asked why the elites are so white. Instead of asking why working-class people of all races are so underrepresented in the halls of power, white liberals called the working class racist for voting for Trump.

wokeness provided the perfect ideology for affluent, liberal whites who didn’t truly want systemic change if it meant their children would have to sacrifice their own status, but who still wanted to feel like the heroes of a story about social justice, who still wanted to feel vastly superior to their conservative and even slightly less radical friends.

To sell an ad for a watch that costs thousands of dollars, you have to convince the watch’s makers that the ad will be seen by people in the market for a device that costs more than the average American makes in a month. More importantly, you have to convince them that the ad won’t be seen by the wrong people, wasting their precious dollars. And the way you do that is running articles that are pitched either above the educational attainment or contrary to the values of the working class and the poor.

Asked why his paper failed at covering communities of color, Otis Chandler, the publisher of the L.A. Times, said, “We couldn’t get the advertising to support that, because the mass black audience and the Chicano audience do not have the purchasing power that our stores require to spend additional money in the Times.”15

As Nancy Isenberg painstakingly chronicled in White Trash, the media has a long history of pitting poor white and black Americans against each other, to the benefit of elites everywhere. It’s a dynamic that’s being reproduced in thousands of articles written by journalists, forcing a false dichotomy between class and race and finding racism at fault, when the truth is that the two are inextricable.

In his seminal philosophical treatise The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel wrote that self-consciousness itself is an evolutionary byproduct of dominating—and of being dominated by—another human. And it isn’t just self-consciousness. Society, culture, and history are produced in the back and forth, or “dialectic,” between the powerful and the powerless—the master-slave dialectic, as Hegel’s pairing came to be known in subsequent iterations.

For postmodernist thinkers, the narratives we accept as making up our history are not based on true events, but simply serve as justifications for power—the only truth the postmodernists recognized.

After all, if the root of inequality lies in something as immutable as your whiteness, rather than any economic or political decision you have control over, you can’t do anything about it but feel guilty.

In a society that is entirely hostile … and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down—that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day—it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury.”30